this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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I always build my computers with a minimum of 64 GB RAM, so at first I didn't see what the fuss was all about. But the article claims the Windows OS technically only needs 4 GB?!
And I see the push for more RAM is most likely to accommodate AI/Copilot, which needs a lot of resources to function. "Gaming" is just the excuse Microsoft is using to get people to upgrade.
This reminds me of a video I saw recently about how old computers didn't have the space to waste code, so every line of code was micromanaged to perfection. But today's computers have so much room on their hard drives, programmers don't care how efficient the code is, as long as it runs. Which leads to your computer seemingly performing as slow (or slower!) than computers used to back at the turn of the century.
Our computers are more powerful than ever, multitudes more than the beginning of the Internet Age. And yet, we have so much wasted code because we have room for it, so our modern computers crawl. Imagine how fast our computers could perform if modern coders programmed like they did in the '90s and earlier.
Windows 11 has a minimum ram requirement of 4GB. 32-bit Win 10 required 1GB, 64-bit 2GB. You won't be doing much of anything with that little RAM, but they will boot and "work".
And as someone that has spent countless hours shaving bytes and bits off microcontroller code to fit functionality to few KB of storage and optimizing routines to shave off a few cycles from loops, it's kinda sad to think about it. Today you do the same things by running Python code often under a full blow Linux distro...
Then we would still have the feature set and security and adaptability and price of that old tech.